Bloviator
i guess this was made to make distinction from pundits, inside beltway types and mebbe CTT, folks with some pretense of expertise as opposed to beck and limbaugh; there may be a 3rd wave coming on youtuber "influencers" candace owen etc
see bad trinity
note fox straight news is defunct
see also provocateur
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thom 3
an 9 24 no lnx
this week may well see a court decide the fate and future of Fox “News” and thus the Republican Party, at least in its current hard-right neofascist form. And odds are Fox viewers are blissfully ignorant about the pitched battle that just played out in a Reno courtroom over the future of their beloved propaganda outlet.
Sir Keith Murdoch was the notoriously racist and misogynist owner of a small newspaper chain in Australia. It was inherited by his son, Rupert, who — using sensationalism and bigotry — turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that spans three continents.
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy” in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times of Australia. Noting that Murdoch owns about “two thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd wrote:
“In Britain, Murdoch made Brexit possible because of the position taken by his papers. In the United States, Murdoch's Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. In Australia, as in America, Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.”
When Rupert was divorcing his second wife he put most of the family’s businesses into a trust, apparently to prevent her from grabbing a larger share of his wealth. The terms of that trust stipulate that when Rupert dies, his four children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence — would share equal votes and power over the business dynasty their father had inherited from his father.
But now Rupert — who’s 93 years old — is having second thoughts, because James, Elisabeth, and Prudence are apparently not all that enthusiastic about Fox “News” and other Murdoch media outlets nakedly lying to and whipping up hatred among their viewers and readers, both here, in Australia, and in the UK. Only Lachlan, Rupert’s oldest son, is loyal to his father’s vision of peddling-hate-for-billions-in-profits.
So, Rupert went to court in Reno — the proceedings are sealed, but the case began last week and wrapped up yesterday (although we don’t yet know the result) — to try to break the trust and hand exclusive or primary control of his fiefdom to Lachlan.
Fox “News” viewers have no idea that they’re being constantly lied to, both by commission (like telling them the 2020 election was stolen by voting machines) and by omission. They think they’re seeing the world “as it is” and getting fair and balanced “truth” and “straight talk,” which is why Fox “News” is so potent.
Without Fox “News” there probably never would have been a January 6th coup attempt, and, given how thin their margins were, likely no 2000 Bush or 2016 Trump presidencies.
The stakes here are enormous. Some media observers believe that a major role in Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was Air America broadcasting my program and others to well over two-thirds of America with big stations in 62 major markets. (That ended when Mitt Romney decided to run for president and had his company buy Clear Channel, then flip all of the stations Air America was leasing from them from progressive talk to sports, killing the network in 2010.)
Similarly, the rise of Fox following Reagan fast-tracking Murdoch’s US citizenship has played a huge role in Republican victories across the nation and the solid hold the GOP has on red state America, where Fox and rightwing hate radio predominate.
Activist investors in the Fox media caliphate have tried to force a vote at the upcoming shareholders’ meeting that would require Fox “News” to label their opinion programming — which constitutes most of their programming — as “opinion.” An attorney for the activist shareholder group, Luke Morgan, told US News & World Report:
“There can hardly be a more significant issue for Fox than its misinformation problem. This is precisely the sort of issue that is appropriate for shareholder input.”
Nonetheless, to Murdoch’s great delight, no doubt, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled last week that Fox doesn’t have to start informing its viewers when their talent crosses the line from reporting to indoctrinating.
Weirdly, this drama within an Australian family may well determine the fate and future of the Republican Party and the conservative and MAGA movements in the US. The future of democracy in America.
It’s a real-life Succession drama and may take months to resolve.
Keep an eye on this story. While it’s probably the most under-reported major news story in America right now, the outcome will have far-reaching consequences for all of us.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-right-wingers-and-trump-apologists-could-get-people-killed-with-coronavirus-disinformation-columnist/
no lnx
How right-wingers and Trump apologists could ‘get people killed’ with coronavirus disinformation: columnist
Written by Alex Henderson March 10, 2020
As the death toll from coronavirus continues to climb — passing 4,200 worldwide on Tuesday, according to John Hopkins University in Baltimore — many figures in the United States’ right-wing media believe that their job isn’t to provide accurate information but to defend President Donald Trump at every turn. And by doing so,Never Trump conservative Max Boot asserts in his Washington Post column, they are helping to make a bad situation even worse.
“President Trump has been widely and correctly excoriated for the way he is dealing with the novel coronavirus,” Boot notes. “By minimizing the danger, he heightens it. Even on Monday, Trump was comparing covid-19 to the ordinary flu — even though its mortality rate appears to be many times higher and its economic effect infinitely greater.”
Boot quickly adds, however, that “Trump could not spread disinformation all by himself.”
“A herd of right-wing pseudo-journalists has jumped the shark along with him,” Boot writes. “They are promulgating narratives so at odds with reality that they are likely to get people killed.”
Boot goes on to cite some examples, including familiar Trumpistas at Fox News and Fox Business.
“On Monday,” Boot notes, “Trish Regan was on Fox Business denouncing coronavirus concern as ‘yet another attempt to impeach the president.’ In her demented view, Trump’s opponents are deliberately inducing stock-market losses — presumably, Democrats don’t own 401(k)s — in an attempt to ‘to demonize and destroy the president.’Naturally, Trump — Fox News viewer No. 1 — retweeted her diatribe.”
Breaking911
@Breaking911
Fox Business’ Trish Regan says coronavirus is a “scam” to “impeach the President”
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Boot is equally critical of Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who insisted on Monday that the president’s critics are trying to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax” and that they are “scaring people unnecessarily.”
“To a lot of viewers,” Boot asserts, “it will sound as if Hannity is calling the virus a hoax, even if that’s not what he intended.”
Boot also slams radio host Rush Limbaugh as “irresponsible” for claiming that reporting on coronavirus is a plot to hurt Trump’s reelection campaign. However, one right-wing media figure who Boot cites as an “outlier of sanity” on coronavirus is Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Boot points out that although Carlson is “often the most rabid host on Fox,” he hasn’t been downplaying the severity of coronavirus and has correctly warned his viewers, “This is real.”
Boot concludes his column by stressing that whenever right-wing media figures try to make coronavirus seem less dangerous than it is, they are putting their more gullible viewers or listeners in danger.
“The ‘conservative’ media have long shown their contempt for facts and science — for instance, by playing down the danger of climate change or Russian election attacks,” Boot warns. “Never has their contempt for the truth been more dangerous than it is today. To defeat coronavirus, we must first combat the mental afflictions — irrationality, conspiracy-mongering and Dear Leader-like devotion to Trump — spread by exposure to right-wing media.”
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11/18 caused by
Conservatives Throw a Temper Tantrum
The loudest outcry came from the right-wing shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh, who claimed that Janet Napolitano and Barack Obama were "portraying standard, ordinary, everyday conservatives as posing a bigger threat to this country than al-Qaeda terrorists or genuine enemies of this country like Kim Jong-Il." Sean Hannity warned his Fox News viewers that “if you have a pro-life bumper sticker on your car, if you have an 'America is overtaxed' bumper sticker, if you have a pro-Second Amendment bumper sticker, they're viewing you potentially as a radical.”
In possibly the most deranged interpretation, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote that the report was a “hit job on conservatives” and “one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read out of DHS. I couldn’t believe it was real….the piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives.”
In a sad sort of irony, Johnson told SPLC that the conservative media personalities who misinterpreted and attacked his report “would have been shocked to know that I personify conservatism. I'm an Eagle Scout. I'm a registered Republican. I'm Mormon. In fact, I was helping the Boy Scouts with a fundraiser when I heard the report being attacked on the news."
Outrage over the report's findings quickly spread to Congress, where several conservative lawmakers demanded the ouster of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Among them was Rep. John Carter, R-Tex., who remarked, "We shouldn't even give her the respect of letting her resign. She should be fired by the administration for accusing honest, American citizens — because of their political beliefs — of being domestic terrorists."
The self-described conservative and Christian non-profit Thomas More Law Center went even further and filed a lawsuit against Secretary Napolitano on behalf a Michigan-based anti-abortion group, claiming the DHS report was all part of a conspiracy between the Obama administration and liberal groups to violate their constitutional rights.
The section of the report that stirred the most controversy referred to “disgruntled military veterans” and cautioned that “rightwing extremists would attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans to boost their violent capabilities.”
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/heres-who-fox-news-considers-prominent-conservative-voices/
Laura Ingraham took to her primetime program on Fox News last night to defend conspiracy theorists, extremists, and an unabashed neo-Nazi as “prominent voices” in the conservative movement that have been supposedly “censored on social media.”
A graphic produced by Fox News featured eight people who have been suspended or claim to have been throttled on social media platforms. The figures featured were dubbed “prominent voices censored on social media."[nice grfx]
Here’s who Fox News considers a “prominent” conservative figures.
The graphic featured first Alex Jones, the creator and leading voice of the conspiracy theory outlet Infowars. Jones is currently facing multiple defamation lawsuits regarding his insistence that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, which resulted in the families of slain children being harassed and traumatized by Jones’ viewers. Jones’ intentional spread of disinformation, harassment, and bullying of victims of tragedies and his regular distribution of offensive content broke enough community guidelines on social media platforms to result in a wide-scale deplatforming of his operation online. Infowars has regularly provided a safe space for extremists to recruit to their efforts.
Next on the graphic was Milo Yiannopoulous, a disgraced right-wing hate monger who stirredharassment and vitriol online and violated the community guidelines of many social media sites, resulting in his accounts being permanently suspended. His comments online after the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, where a white supremacist slaughtered practicing Muslims in two mosques, resulted in him being banned from entering the country of Australia. Yiannopoulous was once a prominent figure in the right-wing movement, thanks in large part to flush funding from the conservative mega-donor Mercer family. The Mercer family funding and Yiannopoulous’ spotlight was dimmed after BuzzFeed News published leaked emails showing Yiannopoulous’ collaboration with white supremacists and his attempt bring them into the mainstream. After audio surfaced of Yiannopoulous appearing to endorse pedophilia, Yiannopoulous was effectively designated persona non grata among conservatives.
Beside Yiannopoulous is Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim activist whose targeting of Islamic worshipers (and any random person whose appearance led her to believe they are Muslim) violated social media rules against hateful content and resulted in her removal from major tech platforms. Loomer has had numerous affiliations with members of the white nationalist movement and endorsed:{ Faith Goldy, who recited the white supremacist “}
:{” in her bid to become mayor of Toronto.}::{ Loomer, a former Project Veritas operative, has collaborated with Infowars on disinformation campaigns surrounding shootings in Florida and Las Vegas.}:
Candace Owens,who began her career in conservative media using the moniker “Red Pill Black,” joined Ingraham in-studio for the segment and was also featured on the graphic. She was briefly suspended by Facebook earlier this month after one of her posts had been flagged for violating community standards, but she currently uses the site freely. Owens got an early boost in her career from Alex Jones and has continued to advance in conservative circles despite her early affiliations. Owens was recently filmed saying that the problem with Adolf Hitler was that he was too ambitious and took his plans beyond Germany.
Michelle Malkin, who argued in a 2004 book that the United States was right to displace and intern 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in America during World War II, was another “prominent” voice Ingraham featured. Malkin frequently parrots white nationalist rhetoric on immigration; at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, she likened immigration to an “invasion” that “endangers” Americans. She closed that speech by saying, “diversity is not our strength,” and followed her speech by giving an interview to the racist website VDARE.
Actor and ardent Trump supporter James Woods, who is not banned from Twitter, but rather has refused to delete a post on his Twitter profile with the hashtag “#HangThemAll” that would result in his account being unlocked, was also featured as a “prominent” censored conservative voice. Before being locked out of Twitter, Woods also shared a meme of the Christchurch shooter depicted as a clown, part of a push by white supremacists to find a new way to launder their voices into relevance.
Fox News deemed Paul Nehlen as another “prominent” conservative voice. Nehlen is a failed state congressional candidate in Wisconsin who pivoted his campaign message to explicitly target Jews and then funneled the money he made to his wife and neighbor. He was banned from social media for being an explicit Nazi and is so aggressive that even the white supremacist internet haven Gab decided to boot him. Angry White Men recently reported that Nehlen and his likewise-failed neo-Nazi counterpart Patrick Little had been debating the best way to start a race war in the United States. And as Right Wing Watch reported earlier this week, Nehlen has promoted the writings of neo-Nazi James Mason, which advocate terrorism to fulfill a white supremacist agenda.
Dan Scavino, White House social media manager,was also featured on this list because he accused Facebook of censoring him for replying to a comment. Platforms are known to throttle accounts if software suspects an account may be spamming and there is no evidence that Scavino was targeted for restriction otherwise.
It’s for segments like these that Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren rejected an invitation to appear on Fox News for a town hall interview, calling the network a “hate-for-profit” scam and drawing criticisms from conservatives. Figures like Meghan McCain insisted that Warren’s refusal to subsidize Fox News with her appearance were off-base and cut her off from conservatives.
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